Three decades of remote sensing habitat mapping, along the Egyptian Coast of Aqaba Gulf, Red Sea.

Over the last three decades, the Egyptian Red Sea shorelines had seen significant growth. In this short period, the Gulf of Aqaba's coastline has been turned into a lengthy belt of tourism settlements and hotels. Due to scarcity of information about this area, herein, a first-time ultimate remote sensing time-series change detection in the region. Landsat satellite data collected over the Gulf of Aqaba during the period from 1985 to 2020 and analysed to estimate urban expansion and shoreline changes in the study area, in addition, from 1995 to 2020 to monitor changes in the coral reef and benthic habitats coverage over time. Landsat 5-TM, Landsat 7-ETM+, and Landsat 8-OLI imagery were used to create a time series of satellite observations. The results showed that the urban development had a large scale increase in the past three decades by about 4.1 km2 and 2.8 km2 at Dahab and Nuweiba'a sectors respectively. While shoreline changed on a smaller scale than the urban development in a regular way without harm to natural resources. Changing - urban and shoreline - came along with tourism intensity. Concerning key environmental factors results of Time Series Analyses showed high variance in time especially during the period from 1993 to 2003, while the sea surface temperature had a stable trend. Benthic habitat mapping at Dahab showed stability of the coverage area of the most benthic habitats except for an increase of both corals and macroalgae between 1995 and 2005, whereas there is a fluctuation in coral coverage at Nuweiba'a area over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]